Tom Dunkel. Color Blind: The Forgotten Team that Broke Baseball’s Color Line. New York: Atlantic, 2013. Print.

In Wichita a mixed-race team was vying for the honor of being crowned “champion”: admittedly, not of the entire sports world, but definitely a hotly contested semiprofessional piece of it. They’d be performing in front of paying customers with prize money at stake and sports writers looking on. This was new and different. (232)

I do read books about subjects other than baseball! This happens to be the third new book on baseball this year that sounded really interesting. I reviewed Swinging ’73 and Baseball as Road to God. Now let me introduce you to baseball history—Color Blind is the kind of book that Ken Burns would love!

Nowadays semiprofessional baseball teams have pretty much left the American landscape. Some may bill themselves as independent minor league, but with American Legion and college baseball, few towns and cities have organized teams that play others for at least a small amount of money.

That was not the case in the 1920s and 1930s when towns, cities, and businesses all over the country fielded teams. In 1935 an enterprising Wichita, Kansas, businessman by the name of Hap Dumont organized a national baseball tournament for such teams under what he called the National Baseball Congress (NBC).

This was during the Depression. The best of the semipro teams were often able to get minor leaguers or former major league players to fill a few roster slots. The team from Bismarck, North Dakota, could offer players sums that were equal to or better than what they were being paid. Often minor league and Negro League teams were unable to pay what they promised their players.

The Bismarck’s team biggest rival, Jamestown ND, did the same. In 1933 both teams hired players from the Negro League. For the last six weeks of the season, Bismarck was able to hire Satchel Paige, whose Negro League team had not paid him in months.

In 1935 the Bismarck team continued to be integrated. (Jamestown had gone back to all white players.) The team included two future Hall of Famers—and I mean Cooperstown, not a local or minor league Hall of Fame. They won the first NBC tournament with a fully integrated team. There were fewer than 500 blacks in the whole state of North Dakota at the time, so prejudice against blacks was limited. And when Paige rejoined the team in 1935, he drew crowds everywhere the team went.

Many scouts and other people in baseball took note of this. We are told that Branch Rickey, not yet a team executive, met with Hap Dumont specifically about integrating teams and having black or integrated teams play white teams in a formal setting. There is a sense of inevitability: Integration was good for the sport.

Color Blind focuses on the 1935 season, but it goes back and forward as well. The book discusses in detail the two men who contributed the most to this season and the Bismarck team, Satchel Paige and Neil Churchill.

Paige, a skilled pitcher and flamboyant character second only Babe Ruth in reputation, brings a lot of life to the story. His quotations and exaggerations and his remarkable pitching are legendary. In passing, the book notes that both Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio said that Paige was the toughest pitcher they ever faced. Indeed, the New York Yankees became interested in DiMaggio because one of their scouts saw him get a hit off Paige in a winter California barnstorming game. Never mind that the hit was a squibber that never left the infield, it was hit off Paige.

Neil Churchill was the co-owner of a Bismarck car dealership and a sports fan who had played for the Bismarck team in the 1920s. His money bankrolled the team—occasionally he would throw in a new car to sweeten the offer. He is credited with attracting talent and, more or less, keeping his team of characters engaged in playing baseball. Churchill would also sponsor a semipro basketball team out of Bismarck. Both his baseball and basketball teams would play barnstorming teams operated by Abe Saperstein. Saperstein’s basketball team was called the Harlem Globetrotters…

The book clearly sets both North Dakota and baseball in context. So many people appear that had some connection with the Bismarck team or the NBC championship: Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Eric Halliburton, Babe Didrikson, George Armstrong Custer, and many others. There was the skilled House of David team from a Michigan religious commune whose men did not cut their hair or beards. At one time there were two other imposter teams that called themselves House of David. When non-commune members played for the team, they would wear false whiskers. There were two teams that each were made up of nine brothers. And in the background of all of this are the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

The legacy of that Bismarck team lived on even though the team itself would later fold thanks to the Depression. After returning from the 1935 NBC tournament, New York Giants owner believed that professional baseball would integrate in ten years. He got the timing correct, even though the rival Dodgers beat him to it.

At the funeral of the last surviving white member of the Bismarck team, Joe Desiderato, the last surviving black member of the team, Double Duty Radcliffe, told how Desiderato stood up for him and the other black players. In their later years, the two men would call each other on the phone weekly. Desiderato’s daughter would marry a man named Joe DiMaggio—but not that Joe DiMaggio.

In 1946 former Bismarck player Quincy Troupe was managing the Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro League. He hired the first white player ever in the league. His experiment did not work out well because the Buckeyes played in too many Southern cities where such integration was not allowed.

This is a fascinating baseball book. It looks into a type and level of baseball that has pretty much disappeared. But more than that, it is a book about people. It is full of fascinating people: players, politicians, promoters, wives, girlfriends. This is a marvelous world we live in, especially because of all the great people in it. Yes, such people may be flawed, but they make the world a wonderful place. Color Blind shows us why.